


Dear Boss,

by orphan_account, whiskeyandspite



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Graphic Descriptions of Murder, Graphic descriptions of violence, Jack the Ripper AU, M/M, Slow Burn, historical documents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-17 12:10:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2309201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Whoever he is, he will do it again. But he won’t be riding the coattails of the gangs next time. It will be his, alone.”</i>
</p><p>Jack the Ripper AU requested by <a href="http://wiith-my-hands.tumblr.com/">wiith-my-hands</a> for the <a href="http://hannibal-acca.tumblr.com/">Hannibal ACCA</a> summer run. We hope you enjoy it!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [solamentenic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/solamentenic/gifts).



> In this: Hannibal is still a doctor, Will, however, is a reporter here.
> 
> And while this is indeed a Hannigram story, the slow burn tag is for its development. We follow historical accuracy up to the point when we shove characters from Hannibal into 19th century London. Regardless, we followed the Ripper timeline, and tried to stay as true to facts as possible.

-=-Chief of Police Jack Crawford-=-

POST OFFICE TELEGRAPHS

**RECIEVED AT:  
**

Commercial Road Post Office,  
Whitechapel E1 A8N

**ATTN:** Jack Crawford       Scotland Yard

Inquest into death of M.A.N. requires assistance. Death appears particularly violent. Suspected connection to other violent deaths in the area - re: E.E.S and M. T. Please advise. 

Constable Zeller, Whitechapel Division

-=-

“Get out of my office, Mr. Graham,” Jack growls, displeasure at seeing the reporter clear in his tone, clear through every line of his powerful frame as he stands.

“Is it true that you’re finally going to investigate something in Whitechapel?” Will objects, trying to find a place to be that’s enough in the way to prevent Jack from leaving.

Already displeased with the situation, Jack considers the former Yard recruit, turned tail on investigation long ago to pursue a more lucrative career in journalism. Or, as Graham had put it, ‘opening more eyes to the truth’. It was a foolish choice, but a safe one, given Graham’s unusual intellectual make up.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Jack tells him, entirely the truth. He puts his hand on Will’s shoulder and pushes, not violently but enough to unbalance the smaller man out of his way. “Get out there and make yourself useful or get out of my way.”

He has to stop, infuriatingly, with those dark, searching, bespectacled eyes on him. Graham doesn’t need him to say anything, he can read it off of Jack like a dog smells shit in the garden to roll in, and come back stinking of knowledge. Jack collects his papers while Graham watches, jams his bowler onto his head and spares a glare for the patient reporter.

He refuses to throw any scraps, instead letting himself out onto the street. Let the papers report whatever it would - nothing would stop it. 

By some small mercy, the man doesn’t follow. Perhaps already engrossed in setting new ideas to paper, unspoken evidence, unintended clues, whatever it was Graham had seen he would write. What worries Jack the most is that despite his associates, and unlike them, Graham rarely makes up a story. The more astute of readers would notice, they always do.

It seems the closer they near to the next decade, the more violent killings become.

And the more ruthless the reporters.

Gangs, both of them. Internal hierarchies that govern a very deliberate structure. It is no surprise Graham had slipped in as quickly and effectively as he had, it’s merely a shame that he now sees Jack for brief and nerve-wracking conversations like this one had been.

With a sigh, Jack watches his breath steam and considers, again, the telegraph. Connections had only been made in the media successfully, circus that it was, yet beyond attributing the violence to some sick sport, little more connects the victims mentioned. Yet Zeller is no fool, and too long in this work to be easily worried like this.

Jack doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like any of it.

He swings up into the waiting hansom cab, anticipating a miserable trip to the east end, and the driver gives a wrinkle of his nose and demands an extra two pence for the risky trip. Jack pays, and takes the newspaper from the bench beside the man despite his protests, settling back to glance over the news - the paper is the Star, to his dislike, the headlines screaming murder and the illustration copperplate prints on the front suggesting an unlikely array of policemen gathered around a crumpled female body.

He notices she looks distinctly more matronly than the victim herself promised to be, a Workhouse woman of ill repute, walking the streets alone at night to garner enough coin for lodging and drinking. 

Soon, that aspect will play up in the headlines, Jack thinks. Or perhaps it already was in the late edition, other reporters jumping onto what they could get that hadn’t already been published in twenty different versions. He finishes the article, and throws the paper at the opposite side of the cab, wishing there were more relief from his frustration. 

Jack tours the scene first but there is nothing to see. The gates are like those of any other city livery, dirty and unkempt. The kerb has been washed clean of blood, scoured up with an old horse brush into a bucket full of water that had grown pink with the amounts of it. Jack knows because the stable boy is rinsing the bucket now, drawing water up from the well while skinny, nervous horses eye him uncertainly, still smelling the blood.

He thinks, bitterly, that help would have come more for the startled horses than the screaming woman, had help come at all. The water runs clean from the bucket and Jack blinks, turning to survey the street again.

He had once borrowed an imagination for such things. Powerful and clever and distressingly accurate. But the mind can only take so much before what contains it retaliates. He had allowed the mind to live, made a judgement call. He wonders, had he chosen differently, if perhaps Martha Tabram would have been the last.

Foolish notions and improbable ‘what-if’s. Violence is the one thing humanity has never needed coaxing in, the one thing it knows how to do fantastically well.

The street is as unremarkable as the act of violence it had witnessed, to Jack’s eyes. Dirty and long. Dark. Cold.

Jack asks the stable boy if he had seen anything, heard anything, merely to have his inquiries heard, to know someone is asking. Predictably, the boy knows nothing, had heard nothing, “just came to calm the horses, sir.”

After, Jack seeks out Zeller.

The walk from Bucks Row to the Commercial Street police station is a grim one, the august heat making the streets miserable and hot with the warm air drifting up from the factories, the smoke of the work houses leaving sooty streaks wherever it seems to drift. The people are disconsolate, disorganized, drifting.

Of course such a thing would happen in Whitechapel, there was no option here but to break under the stress, even to Jack’s unimaginative mind. There are women talking in knots, indiscernible if they are simply gossiping shoppers or rougher ladies - downluck women who stayed barely afloat.

He passes the Ten Bells and steps in for a pint, to listen to the way the air currents are moving. In the back, he sees the telltale mass of bright red hair, the delicate fingers folded on a mug of something hot as she tries to avoid attention. Freddie Lounds has shoved a peaked cap over her bright red curls, and is wise enough not to take any visible notes, but it’s clear she’s there and listening to the wind for the same reason he is.

“Must be that something’s got old Leather Apron’s bile up,” one patron expands, loud and judgmental, laying down his opinion as if it were Sunday’s sermon. “I hear he’s rough on whores anyway, just she must have decided not to congress with no Jew.” 

Freddie’s eyes flash, she lifts her drink, Jack knows what angle she’ll chase. 

Just as he knows the Star will challenge it, if just to be contrary. If she sees him she makes no indication, and Jack avoids the unnecessary stress of small talk that will find its way twisted into the sprawling headlines the next day.

He merely observes.

She merely listens.

The atmosphere is one of bubbling tension, a desperate need for the gossip, the worry, underlined with the genuine fear of what that means. A death is a discussion until it bleeds onto your doorstep, many of these people are here to be in proximity, to feel a rush.

Jack leaves without finishing his glass.

The station is a rush of white noise and too many people, the heat within more unbearable than without. He finds Zeller flushed and exhausted, follows him outside when the other begs the need to smoke, but does not join him.

“I’ve seen nothing like it,” he says, the match burning only long enough for the tobacco to take before it’s flicked aside and the constable exhales in a rush. “Brutality like that is uncommon, even here.”

“Martha Tabram was stabbed thirty nine times,” Jack observes. “Brutality like that is _becoming_ common, especially here.”

Zeller nods, taking off his hard police helmet to tip it upside down under one arm. There’s sweat on his brow, slicking down his wavy dark hair. He scrubs a hand through it to let the air at his scalp. 

“Mary Anne Nichols wasn’t the same,” he says then, working the pipe stem in his teeth. The bit is chewed to hell. A bad habit.

“Tabram was like someone got caught up. Like a lunatic will repeat the same motion over and over until it doesn’t make sense,” Zeller observes. “Nichols was exacting. I’m not sure why I feel that way.”

“Are you saying it wasn’t the same killer?”

“I’m saying it wasn’t the same methods,” Zeller says. “That’s all. Lots of opportunities down here and when it gets hot, it sours attitudes.”

A hum, displeased but agreeing, and Jack casts his eyes back to the station they had left.

“And Katz?”

Zeller makes a sound that was perhaps a laugh, once, before the joy seeped from it like the smoke from his pipe.

“She hasn’t slept. Determined to find something to set this killer away.”

“Has she?”

“The autopsy is taking some time, Jack, a lot was damaged before she even opened her up.” Zeller shrugs, but it’s not dismissive, it’s merely exhausted.

“She agrees it’s different. The anger is differently aimed. Nichols was killed before she was maimed. Tabram was not as lucky.”

“Sensitive psychopath.” Jack deadpans, eyes narrowed and jaw set in displeasure. Zeller shakes his head.

“Whoever he is, he will do it again. But he won’t be riding the coattails of the gangs next time. It will be his, alone.”

-=-

-=-Beverly Katz-=-

_Inventory of possessions as follows:_

  * Black Straw bonnet trimmed with black velvet
  * Reddish brown ulster with seven large brass buttons bearing the pattern of a woman on horseback accompanied by a man.
  * Brown linsey frock 
  * White flannel chest cloth
  * Black ribbed wool stockings
  * Two petticoats, one gray wool, one flannel. Both stenciled on bands "Lambeth Workhouse"
  * Brown stays (short)
  * Flannel drawers
  * Men's elastic (spring) sided boots with the uppers cut and steel tips on the heels
  * Comb
  * White pocket Handkerchief
  * Broken piece of mirror



_Overall, items appear shabby and well used, with the exception of the frock. Appears to maintain cleanliness to the best of ability._

_Pronounced dead at the scene of the crime on Buck’s Row, the body presented with three distinct knife wounds, one on the neck - four inches, a second below that on the neck that severed all tissue to the vertebrae from the left side of the neck to the right side, about 8 inches in length. Wounds appear to be caused by a moderately sharp bladed knife several inches in length and wielded with great violence._

_The victim’s abdomen has several incisions appearing to run right to left, caused by the same instrument and perhaps indicating a left handed attacker…_

She rubs her eyes, realizing how dim it has grown since she sat to write her report. Beverly licks her fingertips after only a moment’s consideration to whether or not she’d washed them since the autopsy and pulls the wick on the oil lamp out a little longer to give herself just a touch more light.

In the orange light, the wet ink of her report looks nearly red, and she has a moment of severe dislike for the cheap chestnut ink she had once so favored. 

Or perhaps she just needs to rest.

She had been warned, when she had come to work here, that this was not nursing, this was not the gentleness of what she was used to. She had laughed, then, remembering the bedpans and the infections, stillborn babies and amputations.

For a while this had been a reprieve.

She had never thought examining a woman so brutalized would send her to such determined rage. Maybe she did, as her colleagues joked, have the countenance of a man. It hardly matters, now, any of it. No silly jokes can cover how morbid, and how real this is. Three women. And this was no domestic beating.

She rubs her eyes again, flexes her hand, exhausted from writing, and considers the time.

She had called for a doctor to provide a second opinion, though he had explained the possibility of his running late would be imminent, now all she had to do was wait for him. 

Beverly gets through several more lines of her observations, discussing locations of the abdominal wounds - which she was fairly sure were inflicted after death, but to what purpose, she isn’t sure. Tomorrow, when Rigor is fully passed, she’ll clean the body and ready it for burial, if there is nothing new to discover.

The knock on her door is almost the exact level of polite required to be heard without demanding to be. She sits up, throwing a handful of sand over the ink of her report to hurry it dry, and lets in her consulting doctor.

“Dr. Lecter,” she greets, and he looks as severe and fine as she had found him to be in his home the other day. Meticulous and carefully attired, she thinks. Handsome, if she’s honest with herself. “I appreciate your assistance on such short notice. I was hoping you might have some thoughts as to why there is less blood than one might expect…”

His dark eyes settle on Beverly and do not judge her as an inferior doctor, but they hold little emotion. She wonders how deep the void stretches inside him.

“Happy to help,” he says, sounding neutral, but intrigued. And then, after a moment, his eyes wake to light, his smile transforms his face. “Though I would prefer different circumstances.” 

"As would I." She admits, drawing a hand through her hair before taking up the bamboo stick from her table and securing a messy knot with it. The air is welcome against the back of her neck.

"Unfortunately I have long since been able to keep decent company for pleasant circumstances."

"Such is the profession," the doctor agrees, another smile soothing his features and softening the lines around his eyes. He tilts his head in question and inclines it when Beverly passes him to direct him to the subject of their meeting.

Whether the sight shocks the doctor when she lifts the sheet covering the woman for decency, is impossible to tell. His face has returned to that impassive meditative look he had entered with, though at once entirely aware.

After a moment, the doctor sets his bag to the floor and takes a step forward.

"May I?"

She likes the fact that he doesn’t ask for her conclusions before he attempts to make his own, does not seek what she knows in order to discard the ideas she has presented and represent them in his own way. Instead, he reaches out with clean, precise hands and considers the wounds as they present themselves, with an untainted pair of eyes.

“You saw the body at the crime scene?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Was there much blood?”

“Perhaps a glass and a half full, once we moved the body. There didn’t seem to be much at all.”

Dr. Lecter makes a thoughtful noise that does not argue with her assessment. He examines the wounds in her belly, and then looks closely at the bruises along her chin.

“The carotid is severed,” he observes. “And the windpipe. I think you’ll find the blood you expect to see from such a cut throat has drained into the lungs instead of the street.”

She had not thought to check - there was no need, Beverly had thought the cause of death quite clear. It is a surprising observation, but she had noted the chest cavity seemed stiff to the touch, heavier than even usual. She makes a mental note to check in the morning when she finishes.

“Anything else?” 

“The wounds are all made with the same knife and wielded unflinchingly,” he offers. “But the one to the throat was first and killed her. The rest is simply… expression.” 

"Of what?"

The doctor notes the resentment in her tone, does not seek to argue.

"Self-perceived inadequacies, perhaps. His inability to perform the role of a husband. Perhaps perfect ability and merely a slander made once in anger that has since manifested into a belief of inability."

It is all clinical, tone unwavering and sure. Beverly considers that to him, all people are merely patients, there is no crushing pressure and unfairness placed upon his sex for work or leisure. This woman is as much a tragedy in her death as she is a simple example of human cruelty.

"It is interesting that he would kill her before inflicting the wounds. Wouldn't the torture be a guiding motivation for the killing?"

“I’m not sure torture was the intent,” he observes. “You are correct, he killed her first - I assume the masculine because of the strength and violence in the cuts, but that comment is not conclusive. But this is the method one uses to kill a steer or a horse.”

He pulls the sheet carefully back over the body. “Perhaps these wounds on the abdomen are not about torture. Anger, certainly. But not torture.”

"So, a slaughterhouse worker," Beverly considers, making another note to add it to her report. Nothing was found on the scene, nothing at all to suggest anything but sheer ruthless brutality.

"It would explain the depth of some of the cuts, they're delivered with incredible force."

"Anger is a universal driver," the doctor nods, straightening his shoulders as he regards Beverly carefully, "much like fear. An instinctual response, one that does not need thought. Once it has though, then such responses turn from survival to cruelty."

He says nothing for a moment, directs his eyes away before walking to the basin nearby to wash his hands.

"I'm sorry I could not be of more assistance."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"I wasn't aware that anyone else had found this exclusive information." She says carefully, a question behind the delicate phrasing, curiosity and displeasure both. And then she sighs, smile warm on her face once more, expression softening._
> 
> _"You don’t mean Will Graham."_

-=-Freddie Lounds-=-

**The Star  
Largest Circulation of Any Evening paper in the Kingdom.  
LONDON. SATURDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER, 1888.  
ONE HALFPENNY.   
page 2  
HORROR UPON HORROR.  
WHITECHAPEL IS PANIC-STRICKEN AT ANOTHER FIENDISH CRIME.  
A FOURTH VICTIM OF THE MANIAC.**   


_A Woman is Found Murdered Under Circumstances Exceeding in Brutality the Three Other Whitechapel Crimes.  
London lies to-day under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate - half beast, half man - is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless classes of the community. There can be no shadow of a doubt now that our original theory was correct, and that the Whitechapel murderer, who has now four, if not five, victims to his knife, is one man, and that man a murderous maniac. There is another Williams in our midst. Hideous malice, deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood - all these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more. The question is, what are the people of London to do? Whitechapel is garrisoned with police and stocked with plain-clothes men. Nothing comes of it. The police have not even a clue. They are in despair at their utter failure to get so much as a scent of the criminal.  
Now we have a moral to draw and a proposal to make. We have carefully investigated the causes of the miserable and calamitous breakdown of the police system. They are chiefly two: (1) the inefficiency and timidity of the detective service, owing to the manner in which Sir Charles has placed it in leading strings and forbidden it to move except under instructions; (2) the inadequate local knowledge of the police. Our reporters have discovered that the Whitechapel force knows little of the criminal haunts of the neighborhood. Now, this is a state of things which obtains in no other great city in the world but London, and is entirely due to our centralised system. In New York the local police know almost every brick in every den in the district, and every felon or would-be felon who skulks behind it. In Whitechapel many of the men are new to their work, and others who have two or three years' local experience have not been trained to the special work of vigilant and ceaseless inspection of criminal quarters.  
Now there is only one thing to be done at this moment, and we can talk of larger reforms when we do away with the centralised non-efficient military system which Sir Charles Warren has brought to perfection. The people of the East-end must become their own police. They must form themselves at once into Vigilance Committees. There should be a central committee, which should map out the neighborhood into districts, and appoint the smaller committees. These again should at once devote themselves to volunteer patrol work at night, as well as to general detective service. The unfortunates who are the objects of the man-monster's malignity should be shadowed by one or two of the amateur patrols. They should be cautioned to walk in couples. Whistles and a signalling system should be provided, and means of summoning a rescue force should be at hand. We are not sure that every London district should not make some effort of the kind, for the murderer may choose a fresh quarter now that Whitechapel is being made too hot to hold him.  
We do not think that the police will put any obstacle in the way of this volunteer assistance. They will probably be only too glad to have their efforts supplemented by the spontaneous action of the inhabitants. But in any case, London must rouse itself. No woman is safe while this ghoul is abroad. Up, citizens, then, and do your own police work!_

Freddie leans back from the typesetter, rubbing her eyes. She’s been here since four this morning, trying to get everything together for the Evening Special Edition - and damned if she’s let some two bit setter take any glory for the story that she was watching shatter Whitechapel. 

People were actually _talking_ about it, though half were saying it was only expected, she might, with a clever turn of phrase, transform these ladies into people for the masses.

But that was only a fringe benefit. 

“Lounds!” her boss hollers from the editing office, and she grins to herself - just like one of the boys. _Finally_.

She makes her way to the office briskly, shoes clicking on the cold damp floor where it had recently been mopped, leaving dry, clean tracks in her wake. Within the office the editor sits with an expression like a storm cloud, heavy brows and pouting bottom lip, a sadly perpetual expression for the man.

"Lounds, this newspaper prides itself on its original content, on getting the news to our readers in a way they can understand and get behind."

"Naturally," Freddie grins, hands clasped almost ladylike before her. "The article will certainly incite thought and discussion, we owe our readers the truth."

"Truth you cannot steal from another publication." The editor notes, one of his brows rising in slow contemplation as his eyes turn to Freddie properly. She blinks, steps closer to the desk.

"I wasn't aware that anyone else had found this exclusive information." She says carefully, a question behind the delicate phrasing, curiosity and displeasure both. And then she sighs, smile warm on her face once more, expression softening.

"You don’t mean Will Graham."

“Will Graham made the early edition with a bulletin about the Leather Apron character last night,” he says, pushing two fingers pointed like a gun and smeared with ink against the table, turning a copy of a rival paper around for her to read. “Now unless you’re ready to start printing a name to this particular Jew…”

“I heard this information myself from a first hand source,” she protests, indignant. You copy another reporter _one little time_....

“Can you cite the source?”

“Does Will Graham cite his?”

“We can’t print drunken gossip out of Whitechapel,” he says. 

“It’s true. It’s truly what the people are saying, boss.”

The editor sighs, heavy, and he reaches up to adjust the shader over his eyes, rubbing at his forehead and leaving a grey streak of smeared ink over his skin. There are stray ones everywhere, from handling more papers in a day than a human being really should. Yet, Freddie knew he wouldn’t be the only one to notice.

“I promise I did my own footwork on this one,” she says, tucking her hands behind her back and pushing out her lower lip in a pout. “We have to print it. We can’t let them totally scoop us, I’m sure the police are going to move on this information, too.”

“The police,” the man sits back in his chair, “Do not base their actions on what the papers print. We base our stories on the action they take.”

A pause then, before he sits forward, chair legs clicking to the floor as he rests his heavy hands against the desk in front of him.

“You are down there often, Lounds, in amongst the dregs of society, you fit in there.” Freddie ignores the jibe, merely blinks, “Have you ever thought of aiming your radar at the people who matter?”

“But the people -”

“Common people believe what we print. You can’t get their thoughts into an article that would defeat its purpose. Start an endless loop.” he gestures, slowly, before setting his hands against the desk again, tapping thick fingers thoughtfully against the wood.

“Look, Freddie, we can’t publish this. Not in this issue, not after what Graham pulled this morning. We can’t be seen as taking information from an insignificant independent print source. It’s humiliating.” he catches Freddie’s protest with a raised hand, to still her, “But we can get information no one else has. Coroner’s reports. First hand accounts from the DIs. All those people who are in the same place you go, every day, and who actually matter.”

He tilts his head, waits for Freddie to understand, waits for her small smile and narrowing of her eyes.

“Good.” he sits back again, back to professional indifference. He pulls a cigarette from behind his ear and ruts around in the first drawer of his desk for a book of matches. “Now go, get something for the morning edition while I find something to cover your blunder on page two.”

She resists kicking his door on the way out, and resists kicking it closed again when she’s passed through it. How on earth had Will Graham gotten the information? Freddie resolves to find out, one way or the other.

But first…

She pauses by the news setter, turning in her completed article with a forged approval certificate from the editor. This was too good to leave out of the paper, scooped or not scooped, this was something that people should know. Heck, it might even save a person, she thinks. 

More importantly, it’ll get her name in the byline.

-

-=-PC Jimmy Price:-=-

_Dear Boss,_

_I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won't fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can't use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck._

_Yours truly  
Jack the Ripper  
Dont mind me giving the trade name_

 

PS Wasn't good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha

 

He dreams about this one, mostly in colors and visceral sensations. He dreams in picture perfect memory of intestines, glistening pink and shoved out of the way as if simply so much stuffing. The gaping cavity of her abdomen yawns wider in his dreams than even reality, red muscle, red blood pooling in the bottom of it, parts missing and never found.

Price has never dreamed about them before, not even that one who’d been stabbed so many times. That, he thought, that was a gang, that was easy to see - excitement carrying someone way past away.

The doctor had said, on this one, that it was deliberate. A man who knew how to work anatomy well enough to sever out exactly what he wanted and take it with him. A trophy.

Price had been sick at the scene, and he had been on the beat in Whitechapel so long he had thought himself immune. Now, perhaps, if the world did not try to surprise him with something even worse. 

The more he thinks about it the more he is certain it would.

Monsters feed on desperation, they feed on the attention they are granted. The exact mirrors of God and relishing just as much in worship. The media provide enough of it, the rest is panic brought on by misinformation or lack of it. People always fear what they cannot understand.

Price wonders what could have driven a man to something to depraved, something so sick, he wonders if he is still a man at all, in anything but appearance. 

He smokes more.

“You know I will give you more if you let me look,” Will tells him gently, flicking the end of his own cigarette to ash it. Price gives him a brief look and shakes his head.

“You chose not to see, Graham, you left. You got out while, to be perfectly frank, it was good. None of us even know what to make of this hell anymore.”

Will frowns, working his tongue against a stray piece of tobacco before quietly spitting it into the gutter.

“I could save lives.”

“Once.” Price notes, tilts his head, and again, all Will can do is frown and sigh. There had always been animosity between the press and the police, but it’s still an unwelcome feeling to be so walled up against people you once worked alongside.

“Really, I’m doing you a favor,” Price continues, and it’s not ironic - not the usual tone he might get when making such a statement. “You’d have to live it again as you wrote about it, once is more than enough.”

Will doesn’t look sold, and Price could care less, dropping the dog end of his cigarette to the stone street and pressing it out with the heel of his shoe.

“That thing you put in your rag about Leather Apron, they’re looking into that,” he admits. “We’re looking into that, really. The ‘Yarders don’t think it’s anything more than bad blood that already existed.”

“Sometimes bad blood escalates,” Will says.

Price keeps the response to himself, but it hangs there. Sometimes, after soaking up enough hatred because of race or religion or unfortunate life choices, pressurized contents became volatile. 

“There’s a letter,” Price admits then. “They think it’s a fake, but the author referenced your article.” 

Will watches him for a long time, eyes just settled on the man’s nose to avoid direct eye contact. It isn’t uncommon for people to write in, suggest they know the killer, suggest they are one - it’s a sensationalization that Will finds as sickening as he had the crime scenes he had left for this. Someone wanting a moment in the spotlight cashing in on another’s suffering and death. He licks his lips and sighs.

“If you won’t let me see it,” it’s not a question, he knows his answer already, Price is grateful he doesn’t have to deny the man. “Look for patterns within it. How much does he claim to know? Are the details those that you have allowed to be published before, are they things that are only on the reports filed.”

Will shakes his head, frowning in thought.

“Killers like this… they want to be caught. They love their work too much to see it leave the papers, to see it slip to the second page or from print entirely. Killers like this insinuate themselves into the investigation. A curious onlooker who is always there, someone with advice police had never considered.”

He shakes his head harder and finally looks Price in the eye, a rare and frankly rather frightening thing.

“He will want to be close, he will want to touch his kills again. Revisit that feeling of power, lord that power over the police as they work.”

“You think it’s really just one person?” Price asks, afraid of the answer. He knows it before Will has to give it, he can see it in the way his eyes turn resolved, staying lowered away from direct eye contact.

“No one’s touching the bodies,” Price protests, at last, working a hand over his face. “But we’ll watch for patterns. Maybe he’ll send another letter.”

Price doesn’t voice the fact that he would rather it not be an accompaniment to another body. He eyes the level of ash in his pipe, and then upends the fine, grey soot into the gutter, before packing another wad of cavendish in, and beginning the process of lighting and tamping, lighting and tamping, before the pipe is going full steam again.

He glances at Will one more time - the man is thin, with a lean, reporter’s hunger on his features. Price recognizes it, some, but it seems out of place on Graham. Dangerous, perhaps. For a moment they both smoke, and then neither of them are looking at each other.

“How close are _you_ getting to this, Will? Isn’t that why you got out?” 

"You can never truly get out," Will says, doesn’t elaborate. Price doesn’t know much about Will’s history on the force, he knows enough, most rumour, some vicious rumour. As everyone.

Will sighs, shrugs.

"I dream about him sometimes." He says, "Nothing more than a dark shadow of endless movement, swarming with flies before they dissipate and he's gone. But I am nowhere nearer to finding his identity than you are."

"The kills will only get crueller," he adds, "He can't do anything less, now, that he is a sensation. It would lower his standing."

"In whose eyes?"

"His own." Will glances up before straightening and bringing a hand up to rub his eyes. "Just... be vigilant."

“All of Whitechapel’s vigilant,” Price mutters. “So long as it’s only for their own skin.”

The pause between them fills with silence for the truth of it, and Price looks away at last, down the dirty streets past the station where clopping horse hooves ring dully on the cobbles. Life here goes on, as it must. He is not sure if that is admirable or terrifying. 

“The letter,” he says then, and reaches into his pocket, deep, to pull up the document. His hand is shaking, but they have facsimiles, they have looked and looked and seen nothing and perhaps it is nothing more than a hoax. “Jack is letting the papers publish it, and he’s going to use these to try and identify the handwriting.”

He passes the letter over, and holds his thumb over the bowl of his pipe until the ember extinguishes before settling it back into his pocket, and turning to go inside, leaving Will on the street and clutching a messy scrap of paper.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“That is what the problem of the Yard is, Brian, you all see yourself as better than the man you are trying to catch.”_
> 
> _“If we aren’t better than him,” he says, “Maybe that’s a good thing. If we’d have to become him to catch him, then we haven’t made the world any safer.”_

-=-Mrs. Bella Crawford-=-

 

**Inquest: Elizabeth Stride  
** Day 1, Monday, October 1, 1888  
(The Daily telegraph, Tuesday, October 2, 1888, Page 3)  
 _Yesterday [1 Oct], at the Vestry Hall in Cable-street, St. George-in-the-East, Mr. Wynne E. Baxter, coroner for East Middlesex, opened an inquest on the body of the woman who was found dead, with her throat cut, at one o'clock on Sunday morning, in Berner-street, Commercial-road East. At the outset of the inquiry the deceased was described as Elizabeth Stride, but it subsequently transpired that she had not yet been really identified. A jury of twenty-four having been empanelled, they proceeded to view the body at the St. George's Mortuary.  
Detective-Inspector Reid, H Division, watched the case on behalf of the police._

_Morris Eagle, who also affirmed, said: I live at No. 4, New-road, Commercial-road, and travel in jewellery. I am a member of the International Workmen's Club, which meets at 40, Berner-street. I was there on Saturday, several times during the day, and was in the chair during the discussion in the evening. After the discussion, between half-past eleven and a quarter to twelve o'clock, I left the club to take my young lady home, going out through the front door. I returned about twenty minutes to one. I tried the front door, but, finding it closed, I went through the gateway into the yard, reaching the club in that way._  
[Coroner] Did you notice anything lying on the ground near the gates? - I did not.  
[Coroner] Did you pass in the middle of the gateway? - I think so. The gateway is 9 ft. 2 in. wide. I naturally walked on the right side, that being the side on which the club door was.  
[Coroner] Do you think you are able to say that the deceased was not lying there then? - I do not know, I am sure, because it was rather dark. There was a light from the upper part of the club, but that would not throw any illumination upon the ground. It was dark near the gates.  
[Coroner] You have formed no opinion, I take it, then, as to whether there was anything there? - No.  
[Coroner] Did you see anyone about in Berner-street? - I dare say I did, but I do not remember them.  
[Coroner] Did you observe any one in the yard? - I do not remember that I did.  
[Coroner] If there had been a man and woman there you would have remembered the circumstance? - Yes; I am sure of that.  
[Coroner] Did you notice whether there were any lights in the tenements opposite the club? - I do not recollect.  
[Coroner] Are you often at the club late at night? - Yes, very often.  
[Coroner] In the yard, too? - No, not in the yard.  
[Coroner] And you have never seen a man and woman there? - No, not in the yard; but I have close by, outside the beershop, at the corner of Fairclough-street. As soon as I entered the gateway on Saturday night I could hear a friend of mine singing in the upstair room of the club. I went up to him. He was singing in the Russian language, and we sang together. I had been there twenty minutes when a member named Gidleman came upstairs, and said "there is a woman dead in the yard." I went down in a second and struck a match, when I saw a woman lying on the ground in a pool of blood, near the gates. Her feet were towards the gates, about six or seven feet from them. She was lying by the side of and facing the club wall. When I reached the body and struck the match another member was present.  
[Coroner] Did you touch the body? - No. As soon as I struck the match I perceived a lot of blood, and I ran away and called the police.  
[Coroner] Were the clothes of the deceased disturbed? - I cannot say. I ran towards the Commercial-road, Dienishitz, the club steward, and another member going in the opposite direction down Fairclough- street. In Commercial-road I found two constables at the corner of Grove-street. I told them that a woman had been murdered in Berner-street, and they returned with me.  
[Coroner] Was anyone in the yard then? - Yes, a few persons - some members of the club and some strangers. One of the policemen turned his lamp on the deceased and sent me to the station for the inspector, at the same time telling his comrade to fetch a doctor. The onlookers seemed afraid to go near and touch the body. The constable, however, felt it.  
[Coroner] Can you fix the time when the discovery was first made? - It must have been about one o'clock. On Saturday nights there is free discussion at the club, and among those present last Saturday were about half a dozen women, but they were those we knew - not strangers. It was not a dancing night, but a few members may have danced after the discussion.  
[Coroner] If there was dancing and singing in the club you would not hear the cry of a woman in the yard? - It would depend upon the cry.  
[Coroner] The cry of a woman in great distress - a cry of "Murder"? - Yes, I should have heard that.  


They do not send a telegram this morning, but a constable, and Bella holds her robe closed tightly around herself against the early morning chill. The steam from their breaths lends an urgency, a surreality to the situation. It is unnaturally cold, this year, and it is only the first day of October. Bella thinks it could snow.

Not even a thick blanket of it would cover over the mess, now.

She watches Jack struggle up out of bed, where he had slept - where she had slept minutes ago, and sets out his shirt and shoes, before returning downstairs to invite the constable in for tea while he waits, to give him some warmth and humanity in a day that promises to be frigid and monstrous. 

They don't either of them speak, enough has been said and enough will be, to Jack when he descends the stairs, from Jack to her, when he returns home. It seems almost an endless cycle, now, of blood and cold and sleep too hard to come by at night.

The constable is older than those Bella had seen work with Jack before, perhaps a man from another division - many of them called on for aid despite numbers being entirely useless in hindering the killer in his work.

Despite what the papers said regarding vigilance and constant patrol.

Jack's steps fall heavy on the stairs and Bella leans into him when he kisses her hair.

"Was this one the same?"

The constable eyes Bella carefully before responding, cautious of a woman's delicate disposition, one Bella had long ago lost, being married to the chief of police.

"A similar brutality in the killing itself, sir, though no signs of the mutilations visited upon previous victims." A pause, "Perhaps he is losing his nerve."

“Maybe he’s just cautious,” Jack allows, and his hand slides off Bella’s shoulder in a slow, regretful motion when she moves to pour his tea, bringing him a steaming cup the same as the constable.

“Where?” Jack asks, and Bella sees him calling up his mental map of Whitechapel.

“Commercial street,” the constable admits. “Down at the Worker’s club. And the place full of people all night.”

“Daring,” Jack says, wryly, sarcastically. He drinks tea until it wakes him some, evidenced by a brightening in his eyes that Bella knows well, and a sharpening to the set of his mouth. “Witnesses?”

“To the body only, sir.”

Bella settles in at the kitchen table, with her own cup, and listens, watches. She knows her husband well enough to see him weighing the possibilities, ticking down priorities in his mind. He will go, she thinks, he has to, but he’s not convinced this is related to the other killings. He’s not been easy to convince of anything, lately.

From the door comes another pounding, a shouting, and it jumps all of them in the moment of natural silence in the conversation. Bella eases to her feet, graceful, and goes to see to the door before whoever it was wakes the neighbors.

It’s another constable, pale, bloodless face, hollow eyes.

“We know, constable,” she tells him, gently. “There’s been another messenger.”

“No ma’am, no. There’s another - there’s a second body ma’am.” 

That is enough to bring Bella's fingers to her lips, stepping aside to let the man in, to close the door quietly behind them and avoid any prying eyes of the press. And there would be some, very soon.

She can see Jack's focus returning much faster in light of this killing, as she prepares more tea for the distraught young man who refuses to sit down. And, in truth, the similarities between this second and the ones before are more so than the other.

Bella wonders, quiet, when it had happened that she had begun to look upon people as Jack does, when it had started to become easy to imagine them as pictures on a page, as words in a report, than living, breathing human beings. Perhaps it is too early, yet, in the day, perhaps once Jack returns - if he does, tonight, if the work allows him to - she will have found her stability, her grounding, to bring Jack back to the same.

"This is worse, sir, far worse than those we've seen before."

She etches the words into her memory, along with the date and time. There are others she remembers with such acclarity, others she could drag up if she tried. 

Bella doesn’t try.

Instead she gets Jack’s coat, his hat, his satchel, and brings it all together to hand to him, listening with half an ear as she moves about their modest bedroom to get everything together.

“Two in one night?” 

“The first one’s had her throat done, same as all the others. The second’s had that and more than her helping of what comes after,” the voice is urgent, on a line near panic. 

“Maybe the first was interrupted.”

“Seems like. He’s taken it out double. And no one saw nothing, not at all. But there was that reporter on the scene right quick afterwards,” the man continues. “The one that quit Scotland Yard.”

“That’s a reporter’s job,” Jack answers, defensive. He was often defensive of his own men - even when they weren’t his men anymore.

Bella brings him the jacket, and everything else, pressing the items into his hands until he realizes they - and she - are there. 

He leans in to kiss her very gently on the forehead. 

“When will you be back?” Bella asks, dutiful for the watching constables but she lets the warning show in her eyes that he’d better not fall so deep into this he couldn’t climb out again. 

“I need to see this done right.” He says, sighs at the expression he gets in return and lowers his voice just enough for her to hear and them to take their leave, one already at the door.

“These women deserve justice, Bella, you know that.”

“They do,” she agrees, quiet, soft, Jack’s rock when he needs her most, “But you cannot help them if you have no rest. You cannot help them if you fall so deep you drown within this, Jack, remember that.”

He nods, a gentle gesture, intimate between them, and presses their foreheads together before stepping back.

“I will be back for dinner,” he promises, as she lets him go. She waits for the door to close, for the sound of their voices to fade into the early morning hum of the city awakening. Then she goes to clear the table, set the cups into the sink to wash as she runs the water to feel it warm.

She alone knows how Jack struggles with his work, how his demeanor, of the authority, of the man in charge, of someone entirely unmoved by proceedings is a facade, merely a mask he has to wear. Without it he would crumble, without it he would falter and he cannot, not with this.

She takes her time with the cups, careful with them, enjoying the warmth of the water on her hands, the way it flows clean. She will wait, as she always does. She will dress and take up the paper and read whatever the press has managed to get into the morning edition. She will filter, as she always does, through the untruths, the sensationalizing.

And when Jack returns she will listen.

-

-=-PC Brian Zeller:-=-

**Times (London)  
** Monday, 1 October 1888  
[Editorial comment.] 

_Two more murders must now be added to the black list of similar crimes of which the East-end of London has very lately been the scene. The circumstances of both of them bear a close resemblance to those of the former atrocities. The victim in both has been a woman. In neither can robbery have been the motive, nor can the deed be set down as the outcome of an ordinary street brawl. Both have unquestionably been murders deliberately planned, and carried out by the hand of some one who has been no novice to the work. It was early yesterday morning that the bodies of the two women were discovered, at places within a quarter of an hour's walk of one another, and at intervals of somewhat less than an hour. The first body was found lying in a yard in Berner-street, a low thoroughfare running out of the Commercial-road. The discovery was made about 1 o'clock in the early morning by a carter, who was entering the yard to put up his cart. The body was that of a woman with a deep gash on the throat, running almost from ear to ear. She was quite dead, but the corpse was still warm, and in the opinion of the medical experts, who were promptly summoned to the place, the deed of blood must have been done not many minutes before. The probability seems to be that the murderer was interrupted by the arrival of the carter, and that he made his escape unobserved, under the shelter of the darkness, which was almost total at the spot. The efforts of the police to trace the murderer have been without result as yet. They set to work without delay. Their first attention was directed to the inmates of a Socialist International Club, close to the place at which the body had been found, but there was nothing to give ground for a reasonable suspicion about any of them; nor was there any one in the neighbourhood of the locality on whom the guilt could be presumed to rest. The body has been identified as that of ELIZABETH STRIDE, a widow according to one account, according to another a woman living apart from her husband, and by all accounts belonging to the "unfortunate" class. Here movements have been traced up to a certain point. She left her house in Dean-street, Spitalfields, between 6 and 7 o'clock on Saturday evening, saying that she was not going to meet any one in particular. From that hour there is nothing certainly known about her up to the time at which her body was found, lifeless indeed, but not otherwise mutilated than by the gash in the throat, which had severed the jugular vein and must have caused instantaneous death._  
Not so the corpse of the second victim. In this case the purpose of the murderer had been fulfilled, and a mutilation inflicted of the same nature as that upon the body of ANNIE CHAPMAN. It was in the south-western corner of Mitre-square, in Aldgate, that the second body was found. It was again the body of a woman, and again had death resulted from a deep wound across the throat. But in this instance, the face had also been so slashed as to render it hard for the remains to be identified, and the abdomen had been ripped up, and a portion of the intestines had been dragged out and left lying about the neck. The time of the murder can be approximately fixed. The policeman in whose beat Mitre-square lies had passed the spot at which the body was found a little before half-past one. On his return beat, at about a quarter to two, he found the body lying as we have said, so cut about as almost to defy recognition. The deed of blood had been the work of a practised hand. The body bore clear proof of some anatomical skill, but the murderer had been in a hurry, and had carried out his design in a more rough fashion than that with which ANNIE CHAPMAN'S body had been mutilated. The best chance of identification seems to be from the victim's dress, of which a minute description had been put out. The inference is clear as to the agency in these two almost concurrent murders. They are the work of the same hand. The murderer in ELIZABETH STRIDE'S case had no more than time to inflict the fatal wound. He was then interrupted, but he was not so to be put off from the completion of his abominable design. The opportunity soon offered itself. A second woman of the unfortunate class was accosted, was lured off into a quiet corner, and time was found for the hurried accomplishment of the full deed of brutality. Beyond this we are unable at present to go. We are once again in the presence of mysterious crimes, for which no adequate motive has been assigned. The object was not plunder - in neither case did the wretched woman offer any temptation for this. The circumstances are such as to forbid the idea of revenge. The victims seem almost certainly to have been mere casual street acquaintances, picked up by the murderer at the moment, and not known to him before. Have these been the freaks of a madman or the deliberate acts of a sane man who takes delight in murder on its own account, and who selects his victims by preference from the weaker sex, either as the safer and easier to deal with or as giving him the means of gratifying some horrid instinct of cruelty and perverted lust? The explanation offered by the Coroner in ANNIE CHAPMAN'S case is equally applicable in these, but there has been so much uncertainty thrown upon it, and the facts on which it rests are so far unestablished, that it is impossible to accept it as proved.  
The recurrence of these several murders at brief intervals of time, and with details more or less closely resembling one another, makes it more than likely that the two murders of Sunday morning will not be the last of their kind. There has been too much system and method, and too obvious a brutal daring which cares little for the chance of detection. But is this is so, it becomes morally certain that the murderer must be found out. He had a near escape from the unlighted yard in Berners-street [sic]. At Mitre-square the police must have been close upon his heels. The fact that he gives proof of the possession of anatomical skill does much to narrow the inquiry. Not one man in a thousand could have played the part of ANNIE CHAPMAN'S murderer. In one of these new cases, if not in both, we have evidence of a similar kind. Meanwhile no means of detection should be left untried. Twelve years ago a murder at Blackburn was traced out by the help of a bloodhound, and, thanks to the sagacious instinct of the dog, the murderer was convicted and hanged. The experiment which was successful at Blackburn might once more be of avail. If any facts could be ascertained about the murderer's movements there would be, at least, a clue which the police might be successful in following up. As the matter stands, they are at fault, and must apparently await helplessly the perpetration of some fresh outrage to give them a renewed chance of getting on the right track.  


He doesn’t wake slowly, as he has the past several times in company, because he hasn’t slept. Instead he sits up against the headboard, and looks down at the reporter sprawled over his belly and breathing deeply. Her hair leaves a strange pattern of shadows cast over his skin, a spill of bright red like blood pouring from his middle.

He can’t tell if she’s feigning sleep, but listening intently.

Brian doesn’t much know that it matters. 

“You printed what I said,” he starts, finding a tail end of his thoughts to yank on. “About our suspects in the Leather Apron fiasco.”

She shifts just a little, and if it is a feigned waking, it’s perfect. Even her eyelashes are red, bright enough to show color against her cheeks as she blinks awake. Her eye makeup is smudged from their sex. It feels improper, indelicate, and the feeling sinks under Brian’s skin like needles. He doesn’t know when he’d sacrificed enough pride to find himself here, as common as this.

A moment more, of silence, a deep sigh as Freddie’s eyes close and she stifles a yawn.

“It was information the people needed to hear,” she tells him, voice soft, in the morning still her own, not the tone she puts on when she wants to wheedle something out of someone, when she wants to wheedle herself somewhere.

“It was speculation.” he murmurs, Freddie blinks, her bottom lip pressing just barely up as though in a pout, or a gentle emulation of a shrug. She lifts her brows and tilts her head.

“From a reliable source,” she adds, “The people deserve the truth, Brian, it is your job to keep them safe, and mine to keep them informed.”

“I was fairly certain that anything I admitted to you post coitus was confidential.” he sighs, and Freddie grins, bright.

“When did we ever agree on that?”

It does not infuriate him like it might, with her clever fingers spider-walking up his chest, with her faded red lips halfway down his belly and moving just above skin in a decidedly suggestive manner. Instead it reaches inside him and turns the switch cold to disgust - at himself, at their actions.

At how he had been lured.

Brian removes himself from beneath her, disentangling her hands from him when she tries to wind them around his middle and keep him close.

“We’re agreeing now,” he says.

“Oh, Brian,” she sighs, sitting up, letting the blanket fall down all the way to her lap. “It’s hard out there, you know. And the people do need to know.”

Her tone is a calculated pout, her lower lip protruding just ever so slightly. The whole effect is ruined by the merriment in her eyes. 

A silent moment of thought before he shakes his head.

“You are a frightening woman.” he tells her, “You take pleasure in the things you write, you enjoy the chaos you can spawn with your words.”

He steps closer again, leans his weight on the bed, against bent fingers.

“You don’t care for the people but the story.”

A mirror opposite to her rival, a mirror opposite to Will Graham, the man who had seen so much that he had left the Yard to speak instead. The man whose articles show insight and thought, not sensationalistic journalism.

“Does it not worry you that you could be hurt, getting stories like this?” he asks, tone gentled again, “You know what the man is capable of, your name is on the byline of the articles he reads and responds to, he knows who you are.”

“I’m not his type,” she suggests, with an amused toss of her bright red curls, a tipping of her chin in a seductive manner that doesn’t totally line up with her words. 

“An argument might be made otherwise,” Zeller says, without a care for how his tone is turning. She hadn’t even denied it, though he hadn’t suspected she would. It’s still a raw sensation against his nerves, to be so clearly and carelessly used.

“Oh,” she sighs, and it heaves her breasts and draws his eyes and he hates himself a little for still wanting what she offers, plying trade. As much as he wants to compare her to the Jennies and Janes down on the corners in Whitechapel, it would reflect as badly on him to do so.

“You’re right, I suppose,” she continues then, without the least repentance. “But I’ve taken to gathering my information in safer ways than down on the street. Credible sources and all. Or - are you saying you’re actually worried about little old me?”

Her tone is a perfect replica of astonishment. 

Zeller’s jaw tightens and he pushes himself to stand again, bends to start dressing, if only to give his hands something to do.

“I am worried about every person in Whitechapel.” he tells her honestly, “I am worried about the people of London, about the common people you take such pleasure in exploiting for your stories.”

A sigh, then. He can’t deny that he is worried for her. This clever, insufferable woman who takes such risks to get stories to the public, hyperbolic and extravagant though they may be. He doesn’t tell her, he doesn’t want to see her smile grow any wider than it is now.

“You put yourself above them,” Freddie notes, sitting back against the pillows, settling the sheets over her thighs until they lie straight, pristine. She seems to care little for how exposed she otherwise is.

“That is what the problem of the Yard is, Brian, you all see yourself as better than the man you are trying to catch.”

“We _are_ ,” he protests, though he has no evidence of it, no idea who the killer actually was. He has to believe, however, that on the merits of having never killed anyone, never scooped out all their guts and thrown them in the street to take away the ones he wanted. 

But if they were measuring on wits or cleverness or tenacity, then perhaps they were the lesser, he and all the others working the case. He sighs, finding it difficult to be angry with a naked woman in his bed. Instead he heads for the basin, splashing cool water into his eyes.

“If we aren’t better than him,” he says, “Maybe that’s a good thing. If we’d have to become him to catch him, then we haven’t made the world any safer.”

He crawls back into bed, still wet, his mind alert and awake and drifting even as Freddie does her best to coax him back into interest, and he knows he will dream of the bodies. 

It does not surprise him, in the evening edition of the next day’s paper, to see his own words in print - screaming off the page at him in capitalized bold as an excuse for the failure of the police to stop these horrors from happening.


	4. Chapter 4

-=-Franklyn Froideveaux-=-

Registration District _Whitechapel_

**1** _888_

**Death in the Subdistrict of** _Spitalfields_ **in the** _County of Middlesex_

__

  ****

**Signature of Registrar:**   _W. Edwards_

It’s the smell of blood that lingers, almost miraculously, amidst the rest of the filth of the city, against the cold - or perhaps because of it, carrying farther than it might have, the heat of it lifting it higher on the air and allowing the wind to sweep it further still.

It’s pleasant imagery to consider for something so unpleasant, but Franklyn has found that the more wine he can feel warming his blood, the easier it is to walk the streets home alone, to ignore the fear and violence that Whitechapel now reeks of instead. Blood, at least, is natural, something within every human being, something that draws life and carries it. The spilling of it is what is unnatural, and it is that that Franklyn drinks the wine for.

But even still, the metallic tang hangs here, more than anywhere else, and it’s worrying, some part of his inebriated, exhausted mind registering that the source must then be close by, perhaps the perpetrator with it. Hulking like a creature of nightmares over a corpse -

Perhaps too much wine, tonight, if his imagination would offer such images. He does not need them.

But he does slow his stride, wavering and weaving as it is, unhelped by the uneven cobblestones, trying to quiet them against the street.

Miller’s Court is a quiet place, cold and dismal in the early November rain. He does not care for the weather, but he had cared even less to stay in drinking the poor dregs of wine - well watered - he’d had left at home. He had hoped to catch sight of the doctor drinking at the Ten Bells, where he had witnessed the man once before, proper and straight and handsome in a way Franklyn could not hope to match.

He could watch, however. Drink until courage rousted itself in his gut, or until he could at least see the slow unfolding of more of the man. He admitted a fascination, told himself it was harmless.

A loose stone turns beneath his foot, sends him against the wall of a house, and Franklyn freezes, uncertain why he feels sudden, imminent danger. It is so late it is nearly morning again, with the drizzle even the whores have gone in, finding patrons or finding it hopeless.

Above his head is a window, and the smell is stronger here - he might have lied to himself and assumed a butcher, or perhaps that someone had slaughtered a cow or a horse, but this scent is coming from inside.

Franklyn checks his pocket watch in a moment of swim-headed lucidty. It is 3:57 in the morning and then he dares the window, just a peek. There are lacy curtains in the way, but they are old and yellowed with age, nearly sheer in some places - if he gets close enough. A hole admits his eye, shows him something lurid and red brown within, something moving in the darkness.

It isn’t the movement of something unnatural, it is entirely human, exhausted by whatever activity it had been involved in just moments before. A hand comes up to draw the back of a wrist against tired eyes, shifting something above them that draws attention. Glasses, perhaps, perhaps just a trick of the light.

Within, the thing straightens, shoulders back and head also, taking slow breaths and keeping a precarious balance.

But it is under its feet that Franklyn forces himself to look, the strange excitement of being able to witness something real, something frightening and something he can use, can explain to the police - to the Doctor when he inevitably asks him about the incident when next they are in the bar together, when he inevitably will be telling everyone but happy to go with the man to a quieter part of the bar to talk in depth, as equals - flooding his veins and shuddering his breath.

There, splayed as the papers had claimed the other had been, a woman. Or what once was left of one, what once had been a living, breathing, human being. Perhaps someone on the street that Franklyn had seen but never noticed. And that hits cold against him, draws up nausea and not excitement, and a clammy hand presses to damp lips as he forces himself to keep looking, as the figure in the room steps over the body as though it means nothing at all and stretches long arms above its head before reaching, himself, for a pocket watch.

His fingers leave red smears on the brass surface, thicker and heavier than blood. It is some denser fluid, internal, and Franklyn’s wine-soaked stomach gives another heave, another crash against his ribcage in an attempt to evacuate itself.

The shell beneath the figure is hollow, arrayed loosely as any number of other ladies might be this evening, offering themselves - only what she has given is everything, flayed skin and flagrant parts left. The killer - her killer - folds something into a paper package which he holds against his bloodied chest, and then when he turns, Franklyn is sure he has been seen.

He drops himself away from the window and shoves his hands against his throat to keep himself from throwing up the cry of Murder and becoming the victim of it - the second. The eyes he had seen were light, under dark curls matted in gore. He had an impression of beard, but also an animals stare, a glare that reached down into his center and pulled on his every instinct to flee.

It was the ancient stare of wolf at man, furless, clawless,  and made to think about flight from such danger.

“Oh, Murder,” he starts, in spite of himself, and scrabbles for a hold on the sidewalk, scrambling on all fours to get away from the scene, to get away from the monster he is certain must be chasing him, made of blood and predatory grace.

It is just past four in the morning and Franklyn runs for the police station as fast as his unsteady legs will carry him, and knows in the back of his mind that perhaps he will never make it. If he <i>does</i>, though - oh if he does what a story.

And then as if manifest from his thoughts themselves, steps the Doctor into the pool of light in the street ahead of him, and Franklyn’s heart could not be gladder.

“Oh,” he says, and his breath is a screaming metal bar in his lungs, piercing through with every gasp. “There’s been - up on Miller’s Court - there’s a monster and it’s after-”

He cannot arrange his words into a line, cannot arrange his thoughts.

A blink, a gentle tilt of the head and a narrowing of dark eyes in something like recognition before that passes, and the Doctor steps forward to offer a hand for Franklyn to take, to stand. And Franklyn would smile if his mind could slow, if his stomach could stop roiling and his heart stop hammering so loud he is unsure if he’s breathing.

“A very early morning for a stroll,” the Doctor comments, adjusting his grip to press firm fingers to the pulse at Franklyn’s wrist, eyes down to measure it by memory, no watch necessary, before he hums.

“My dear man, you’d best to bed.”

“But… Miller’s -”

"Brings demons your mind cannot handle in the dark.” he tells him softly, tone reassuring, a bedside manner on the cold streets, and Franklyn finds himself soothed, enough, at least, to stop his shaking, to ease his breathing.

“Wine has an unfortunate habit of pulling monsters from shadows and demons from gutters.” the Doctor continues, voice that same, soothing timbre as Franklyn had heard it in Ten Bells, as he had imagined it directed at himself as they spoke together of many things and nothing at all. And he realized, through his groggy mind, that they are speaking now, together, alone on the street, as he had always wanted. And he is dizzy with drink and exhausted and far from presentable.

There is a soothing timbre to his tone that calls to ease Franklyn, penetrating his mind with the reality of here and now, which was that he was standing in the street, alone, with Dr. Lecter - and nothing was chasing him. Perhaps even the smell of blood had never been real.

He is unable to conjure the exact color of the blood in his memory, and the world swims back down into a haze as fear leaves him, as his heartbeat stills. Wine lends him courage instead, where it had failed him at the gate on Miller’s Court.

“You’re right, Doctor. I should get home - will you see me there?”

A blink, surprise, before a soft expression curls thin lips and the man inclines his head.

"I shall be not several steps behind, my friend, I have a simple matter to attend that will not hinder me long."

Franklyn smiles, shoulders straightening and eyes barely open. Liquid courage indeed. He feels it finally when the Doctor lets go of his pulse - his hand - that he had held till then, that his balance may not yet be his own, but he doesn’t detain the man longer.

Another smile, another few steps on his own before the Doctor's sure steps echo behind him and disappear, and Franklyn realizes that perhaps he should have given the man his address.

In the morning he reads of it, with a pounding head and heart, his unquiet thoughts wondering fearfully if he had sent the reserved, handsome Doctor Lecter on to his death, or even grave injury. He suffers his hangover in self-loathing agony and prays to read nothing more in the evening edition.

-

-=-Will Graham-=-

From hell.

_Mr Lusk,_

_Sor_

_I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman and prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer_

_signed_

_Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk_

__

He only considers the footfalls that finally match his heartbeat, now slowed and steady, as he wipes his fingers against a rag.

It had been simple; tailoring a response to his letter to fit the smaller articles, starting a simple code based on the one piece of him Will had had, waiting. And he had come, of course he had come, clever and sly and elusive, brilliant and feral.

Uninterrupted, here, where Will can give him this gift, can watch him work as he sends the Yard towards a different path, for a time. To give them time. If just to talk. If just a story for Will himself that no one reads.

He had written his last letter in blood and skin, in cuts and removals. What he had left had been abbreviated, but he sees, as he maintains his professional attitude and takes notes, that Hannibal reads the message left in omission.

At home, carefully held and wrapped, he has the rest of the ode. Butcher’s paper and washing left it bloodless and ready. They take the body away, but not all of it - only all that they have, and leave Dr. Lecter a study in grave reserve, washing his hands in a bucket of water drawn from a neighbor’s well, held helpfully by a police constable happy to have a duty that hadn’t involved actually touching the body.

There is a light in the back of Hannibal’s dark eyes, a recognition, and he looks up when Will lifts his pencil, his notebook held before him like a shield - as an excuse, which is what it is. He has seen the workings of Hannibal’s mind, the deep machinations, and answered. He awaits his reply, and the other reporters shift moodily behind him when Hannibal approaches and waves them off.

“How’d you convince him, Graham?” Freddie Lounds bites, sulking away when Hannibal turns his cool gaze on her in refusal. She’s off to more trusted sources again, safer sources. She’s off to warm her body in a different bed.

Will is tempted to spit back, “I asked”, but refrains, content with the fact that he will get to talk to the man, allowed even a semblance of privacy under the watchful eye of the Yard, always present but not oppressively so.

He follows the Doctor as the other directs him to a smaller room of the house, just as empty, just as dusty and cold but dry, here, no blood seeping through the floorboards as Will had left it not hours before.

The door closes and the sounds of the police are muffled, if barely, enough for Will to slip the pencil behind his ear, set his notebook into his pocket. It is rare he writes down his interviews, the pages just for show, sometimes there for his own thoughts and muddled connections. He finally looks at the man properly, the man he had seen amidst the crime scenes, a phantom before he had inevitably shown up in person. He takes in his form and carriage, the hands that had wrought so much cruelty.

“It’s a masterwork,” Hannibal observes, tilting his chin, tipping his head and narrowing his eyes in a way that conveyed understanding without stating it. Will’s pride wakes, a slow sullen thing that purrs like a cat to be noticed, to be touched with praise.

“A message,” Hannibal continues. “A proposal?”

Will reaches into the image of Hannibal’s mind - the Ripper’s mind - in his mind. The thoughts that had once tasted foreign and now tasted like blood and bile spattered onto the back of his hands.

“A proposal,” he agrees. “An offering.”

Hannibal smiles, and it is a bright thing, a gesture of thick pleasure that pours like molasses down their tongues in unison, because Will feels it, feels his mouth trying to answer with the emotion ringing in his chest like an echo in a cage.

“I accept,” Hannibal says in an undertone, and he steps across the distance, shoes black and clean on the bare, worn wooden boards of the floor. His hand settles on Will’s cheek, and Will can smell the old blood settled beneath his nails, and the touch is soft and careful on his skin, then around the back of his head, cupping fingers through his curls.

“When did you feel it?” Hannibal asks.

“You got involved,” Will says quietly, eyes up, taking in everything he can of the man, the monster, the void in front of him. It’s exhilarating, it’s so, so welcome.

“From the very first. You wanted to see.”

The man steps closer, ducks his head so he and Will can press their foreheads together in a gentle lean, Will’s eyes falling closed, the doctor’s hooded, as they just breathe this way, share the space, take in the atmosphere of the site of one killer’s love letter to another, wrought in pain and death and the lingering smell of both against the wood.

Will’s hand comes up to rest over the Doctor’s wrist, a light hold, and he turns his head, parts his lips to sigh against the man’s hand.

“So many look but never see.” he breathes, “They speculate and they bask in the violence and terror. Reporters, policemen, their wives and children, their neighbours and friends. More and more and more people but no one ever stops to <i>see</i>."

He draws a breath slowly and releases it.

"I saw." He adds softly.

“You did,” Hannibal agrees, pride and soft pleasure in his eyes, they draw up into wells that wrinkle at the edges and plunge deep in the center. “You’re the only one who ever will. I got your letters, Will, and your invitation.”

And he had allowed himself to be lured, to return to a scene that was not his, to pronounce a brutal severance of life that would be credited to the name the papers had appended to the second murder, when the moniker of Leather Apron had failed to produce adequate terror.

They linger a moment longer, long enough for Hannibal to leave Will an address, a set of instructions.

“I accept your proposal. Let this be the ripper’s last victim,” he says, finally straightening, with a last tender stroke of Will’s cheek, a touch that leaves the cool sensation of his skin lingering and the smell of blood just barely, faintly, clinging to his skin. “In the future, what kills will be a new entity.”

The doctor smiles, and pulls on fine, lambskin gloves. “No one deserves to see but you, and to continue in this method is to risk interlopers.”

“We’ll find a new method,” Will suggests, running his thumb against his fingertips when they itch to be gone, or to bury themselves back into a body.

“Many,” Hannibal agrees.

Will stays in the room as Hannibal leaves, taps his pen quietly against the empty notebook to keep up appearances, opening and closing it again and again in an absent, quiet way. He has the address memorized, instructions swimming through his mind in a soft ambience.

He says nothing as he passes by the constables and lingering detectives. Calmly keeps his silence past all the reporters, barely turning a glance to Freddie Lounds when she speculates and follows him to the first corner of the street. He says nothing to anyone at all as he makes his way home and waits for night before seeking the address in his mind with sure steps and quiet footfalls near the gutter.

He is not followed.

He is not noticed.

Will takes his time on the stair, adjusts his cuffs, allows his eyes to linger down the street before he raises his hand to knock.

There is a moment of heavy, hanging tension when the door doesn’t open immediately. In the back of his mind, Will knows this is the moment of trust, the point when he could have brought the police and blamed even the last victim on Hannibal, shifting the kill onto his shoulders like a serenade.

Instead he has come alone, without even his notebook. Instead, a parcel.

Hannibal’s smile when he opens the door is worth the investment Will has made. He accepts what he is given, the rustling paper package that is cool to the touch from where it has been kept in ice.

“For dinner,” Will explains, and Hannibal’s smile widens just a little.

“Come inside,” he offers, and swings the door open. Within, the place is opulent, a grand old manor slowly being consumed by the dirty city. In the rooms they pass, there are drop cloths on the furniture, packed crates.

“I had thought a change of scenery would be favorable, before we miss the oncoming spring entirely, held down in this morass,” Hannibal says conversationally, laying out his line, and Will’s heart speeds.

“We?”

“If you’d like,” Hannibal affirms.

In the kitchen, nothing is packed or covered - it is a warm space, alive and thrumming, open to the dining area in some unusual rejection of the British convention of hiding all of the cooking, as if it were a dirty thing to be kept from sight. Will can barely take it in, just past the doorway, when Hannibal’s hand turns him with a gentle grip at his elbow.

The doctor kisses him, and there is the press of packaged meat between their chests as Will leans into it.

Something that was once alive, now no longer so, trapped between two predators that happened to be better, faster, more prone to boredom, and the more frightening for it.

Will sighs when he’s released, lips parting gently, though they  press back together before his eyes open.

He feels alive for the first time in months, for the first time he can truly remember. Even beyond the pendulum swings, beyond the crime scenes, where Will had breathed, alive, surrounded by death and the thoughts of countless killers. He feels an appreciation, here, a power in what he has done, in whom he has snared with his intent.

"To the country?" he asks, letting his lips tilt as he watches the doctor in front of him **.**

“To the country, and then who knows. Perhaps city life will call us back. Any place but London,” Hannibal says, curling his fingers beneath Will’s chin affectionately.

“After dinner.”

**Author's Note:**

> A HUGE round of applause for [cognomen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen), everyone. He is a freaking expert on Ripper and it has been the most incredible experience learning from him.  
> Things to note:  
> \- all the documents listed are genuine, except for the first telegram that we invented  
> \- this is a new style we decided to try, to see how it would work - it is a more cinematographic style, but we hope it reads well regardless  
> \- not beta read, apologies for any mistakes


End file.
